Shura - Touch

Listening to BBC 6 Music’s most blogged artists of the last six months show (in association with Hype Machine) last night only confirmed what I already suspected: I am not all that interested in writing about what everyone else is already covering. In other words, if you want to read about Banks then you might want to try all the other blogs ever, bar this one.

Whether this means I’m a lone ranger, scavenging the outer reaches of the known territories, or just a bit lazy - if I did a bit more writing, then maybe I’d get round to the much-blogged eventually - I don’t quite know, although scanning the list I don’t think there are many artists in the Top 20 I’m capable of forming very strong opinions about.

For the second part of the show, 6 Music handed control over to the listeners to suggest artists they should be playing. Now, what this really means is that listeners suggest a wide and esoteric range of acts, and 6 Music select the ones that they playlisted earlier in the year and play those, ignoring the more interesting fringe requests, but more on that theory in a later post…

They did, however also invite Sean Adams of Drowned in Sound, and Hector Barley from The 405 to mention a few names, and pick a track each. Today’s “In Case You Missed It” selection was Barley’s choice: a song he has been obsessed by for a while, by an artist he is happy to declare will probably be his favourite come the year’s end.

There’s a love between us still but something’s changed and I don’t know why

The song is Touch, by Shura, and it’s immediately easy to see why Barley is so smitten. Touch lays an emotionally direct lyric of love and confusion over a track that could have been lifted straight out of the 80s without anyone noticing. And I want to make it clear that in no way is that a bad thing. It’s soft and smooth, and very much from that era’s pop catalogue, rather than its new wave collection.

In another example of my pulse-proximity, the track already had over a million combined plays and views on Soundcloud and Youtube before I got anywhere near it…